Indignation

Dear Olivia,

You think I’ve spurned you because of what happened in the car that night. I haven’t. As I explained, it’s because nothing approaching that had ever happened to me before. Just as no girl ever before has said to me anything resembling what you said in the bookstore. I had girlfriends whose looks I’ve liked and who I told how pretty they were, but no girl till you has ever said to me that she liked my looks or expressed admiration for anything else about me. That isn’t the way it worked with any girl I’ve known before or that I’ve ever heard of — which is something that I’ve realized about my life only since you spoke your mind in the bookstore. You are different from anyone I’ve known, and the last thing you could ever be called is a slut. I think you’re a wonder. You’re beautiful. You’re mature. You are, I admit, vastly more experienced than I am. That’s what threw me. I was thrown. Forgive me. Say hello to me in class.

Marc

But she didn’t say anything; she wouldn’t even look my way. She wanted nothing further to do with me. I’d lost her, and not, I realized, because her parents were divorced but because mine were not.

No matter how often I told myself I was better off without her and that she drank for the same reason she’d given me the blowjob, I couldn’t stop thinking about her. I was afraid of her. I was as bad as my father. I was my father. I hadn’t left him back in New Jersey, hemmed in by his apprehension and unhinged by fearful premonitions; I had become him in Ohio.

When I phoned the dormitory, she wouldn’t take my calls. When I tried to get her to talk with me after class, she walked away. I wrote again:

Dear Olivia,

Speak to me. See me. Forgive me. I’m ten years older than when we met. I’m a man.

Marc

Because of something puerile in those last three words — puerile and pleading and false — I carried the letter in my pocket for close to a week before I dropped it into the slotted box for campus mail in the dormitory basement.

I got this in return:

Dear Marcus,

I can’t see you. You’ll only run away from me again, this time when you see the scar across the width of my wrist. Had you seen it the night of our date I would have honestly explained it to you. I was prepared to do that. I didn’t try to cover it up, but as it happened you failed to notice it. It’s a scar from a razor. I tried to kill myself at Mount Holyoke. That’s why I went for three months to the clinic. It was the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas. The Menninger Sanitarium and Psychopathic Hospital. There’s the full name for you. My father is a doctor and he knows people there and that’s where the family hospitalized me. I used the razor when I was drunk but I had been thinking about doing it for a long time, all that while I wasn’t living but went from class to class acting as though I were living. Had I been sober I would have succeeded. So three cheers for ten rye and gingers — they’re why I’m alive today. That, and my incapacity to carry anything out. Even suicide is beyond me. I cannot justify my existence even that way. Self-accusation is my middle name.

I don’t regret doing what we did, but we mustn’t do anything more. Forget about me and go on your way. There’s no one around here like you, Marcus. You didn’t just become a man — you’ve more than likely been one all your life. I can’t ever imagine you as a “kid” even when you were one. And certainly never a kid like the kids around here. You are not a simple soul and have no business being here. If you survive the squareness of this hateful place, you’re going to have a sterling future. Why did you come to Winesburg to begin with? I’m here because it’s so square — that’s supposed to make me a normal girl. But you? You should be studying philosophy at the Sorbonne and living in a garret in Montparnasse. We both should. Farewell, beauticious man!

Olivia

I read the letter twice over, then, for all the good it did me, shouted, “There’s no one around here like you! You’re no simple soul either!” I had seen her using her Parker 51 fountain pen to take notes in class — a brown- and-red tortoiseshell pen — but I had never before seen her handwriting or how she signed her name with the nib of that pen, the narrow way she formed the “O,” the strange height at which she dotted the two “i”s, the long graceful upswept tail at the end of the concluding “a.” I put my mouth to the page and kissed the “O.” Kissed it and kissed it. Then, impulsively, with the tip of my tongue I began to lick the ink of the signature, patiently as a cat at his milk bowl I licked away until there was no longer the “O,” the “l,” the “i,” the “v,” the second “i,” the “a”—licked until the upswept tail was completely gone. I had drunk her writing. I had eaten her name. I had all I could do not to eat the whole thing.

That night I couldn’t concentrate on my homework but remained riveted by her letter, read it again and again, read it from top to bottom, then from bottom to top, starting with “beauticious man” and ending with “I can’t see you.” Finally I interrupted Elwyn at his desk and asked him if he would read it and tell me what he thought. He was my roommate, after all, in whose company I spent hours studying and sleeping. I said, “I’ve never gotten a letter like this.” That was the bewildering refrain all through that last year of my life: never before anything like this. Giving such a letter to Elwyn — Elwyn who wanted to operate a tugboat company on the Ohio River — was, of course, a big and very stupid mistake.

“This the one that blew you?” he said when he finished.

“Well — yes.”

“In the car?”

“Well, you know that — yes.”

“Great,” he said. “All I need is for a cunt like that to slit her wrists in my LaSalle.”

I was enraged by his calling Olivia a cunt and determined then and there to find a new room and a new roommate. It took a week for me to discover a vacancy on the top floor of Neil Hall, the oldest residence on the campus, dating from the school’s beginnings as a Baptist seminary, and despite its exterior fire escapes, a building commonly referred to as The Firetrap. The room I found had been vacant for years before I again filed the appropriate papers with the secretary of the dean of men and moved in. It was tiny, at the far end of a hallway with a creaky wooden floor and a high, narrow dormer window that looked as though it hadn’t been washed since Neil Hall was built, the year after the Civil War.

I had wanted to pack and leave my Jenkins Hall room without having to see Elwyn and explain to him why I was going. I wanted to disappear and never endure those silences of his again. I couldn’t stand his silence and I couldn’t stand what little he said — and how grudgingly he said it — when he deigned to speak. I hadn’t realized how much I had disliked him even before he had called Olivia a cunt. The unbroken silences would make me think that he disapproved of me for some reason — because I was a Jew, because I wasn’t an engineering student, because I wasn’t a fraternity boy, because I wasn’t interested in tinkering with car engines or manning tugboats, because I wasn’t whatever else I wasn’t — or that he just didn’t care if I existed. Yes, he had loaned me his treasured LaSalle when I’d asked, which did momentarily seem to suggest that there was more fellow feeling between us than he was able or willing to make visible to me, or maybe just that he was sufficiently human to sometimes do something expansive and unexpected. But then he’d called Olivia a cunt, and I despised him for it. Olivia Hutton was a wonderful girl who’d somehow become a drunk at Mount Holyoke and had tragically tried to end her life with a razor blade. She wasn’t a cunt. She was a heroine.

I was still packing my two suitcases when Elwyn unexpectedly appeared in the room in the middle of the day, walked right by me, gathered up two books from the end of his desk, and turned and started back out the door, as usual without saying anything.

“I’m moving,” I told him.

“So?”

“Oh, fuck you,” I said.

He set down the books and punched me in the jaw. I felt as if I were going to collapse, then as if I were going to be sick, then, holding my face where he’d struck me, to see whether I was bleeding or the bone was broken or the teeth were knocked out, I watched as he picked up the two books and made his exit.

I didn’t understand Elwyn, didn’t understand Flusser, didn’t understand my father, didn’t understand Olivia — I understood no one and nothing. (Another big theme of my life’s last year.) Why had a girl so pretty and so intelligent and so sophisticated wanted to die at the age of nineteen? Why had she become a drunk at Mount